“The USGS has a long history of measuring stream stages, but the equipment they use is very expensive. We need to find cheaper ways to do the same jobs we did in the past, and CrowdHydrology is one way to do this”

Chris Lowry

UB Assistant Professor of Geology

A project that asks hikers, fishermen, birdwatchers, school kids
and nature-lovers of all stripes to monitor stream levels is
expanding from its home base in Western New York to three new
states: Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin.

CrowdHydrology was
started in 2011 by Chris Lowry, UB assistant professor of geology.
He came up with the idea after reading about a California
researcher who used crowdsourcing to monitor roadkill.

“When I heard that this guy was actually getting people to
send him info on roadkill, I thought there’s no reason I
couldn’t get people to send me info on how much water is
flowing through streams,” Lowry said in 2011 shortly after
launching CrowdHydrology.

The project began with nine pilot locations in Western New
York.

Each site is simple, consisting of a giant measuring staff and a
sign explaining how passersby can contribute to CrowdHydrology by
texting water levels and stream locations (identified by a station
number) to researchers.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is supporting
CrowdHydrology’s expansion, giving Lowry and colleagues a
grant to install stream gauges at about 10 additional sites in New
York State, 20 each in Michigan and Wisconsin, and three in
Iowa.

The project will help researchers track and understand the flow
of water through a broad region, while engaging the public in
science that matters in their daily lives.

This type of data collection is particularly important with
tight budgets forcing USGS to discontinue the recording of water
levels at many streams the agency has monitored for decades. Each
of the new CrowdHydrology sites sits atop a glacial aquifer that
provides much of the drinking water for Northern states.

“The USGS has a long history of measuring stream stages,
but the equipment they use is very expensive. We need to find
cheaper ways to do the same jobs we did in the past, and
CrowdHydrology is one way to do this,” says Lowry, who is
partnering with USGS research hydrologist Michael Fienen on the
project.

Future plans for CrowdHydrology include:

Completing the current expansion. Sites are up and running in
all four project states, but new installations will continue
through the end of June.

Designing a smartphone app that geolocates users. People
sometimes forget to include their stream station location when they
text CrowdHydrology. An app with geolocation abilities could do
that automatically.

Creating a do-it-yourself kit. The dream is to build a
mail-order kit containing all the equipment needed for
CrowdHydrology so that K-12 teachers can install stream gauges on
their own for use in class projects.

Whenever a citizen scientist texts CrowdHydrology, a computer
program called Social.Water that Lowry and Fienen designed feeds
the data to the project website where anyone can view the
information.

As CrowdHydrology grows, researchers are targeting locations
like nature centers—places where visitors already are
thinking about conservation or where a staff member or other
stakeholder is primed to make regular measurements.

At CrowdHydrology’s nine New York pilot sites, Lowry found
that high foot traffic didn’t guarantee success. Gauges at
popular trout-fishing spots received little data—a
disappointment.

“We went with the assumption that passive crowdsourcing
would be fine, but that didn’t work,” Lowry says.

What did work was a gauge he hammered into a pond at Beaver
Meadow, a Buffalo Audubon Society nature preserve in Western New
York.

Visitors there texted CrowdHydrology more than 100 times between
May and November 2011, according to a 2012 paper by Lowry and
Fienen in the journal Ground Water. The crowdsourced measurements
were fairly accurate, roughly mirroring data from a mechanical
gauge that the researchers installed for the purpose of
double-checking for one month. Since November 2011, about 200 new
texts have arrived from Beaver Meadow, Fienen says.

The numbers captured an unexpected phenomenon: beavers returning
to dam up the pond after an absence of many years. The data showed
water levels rising steadily in the first months of 2012
after the beavers’ arrival, then dipping in November 2012 as
the remnants of Hurricane Sandy ruined their dam, then reversing
again as the animals made repairs, Lowry and Fienen say.

“The CrowdHydrology project is starting to fill in data
gaps where we can’t collect measurements as often as we would
like. The fact that any passerby can contribute to the science
is probably the greatest benefit,” says Fienen, who works in
the USGS Wisconsin Water Science Center.